WoW – More fun together!

Wait, I have a mage?

My mage, Invariant, was my first main. She’s been somewhat neglected in the last year, doing the holidays and grinding pets and other “fun” stuff but not getting much real playtime. I like healing too much, and raiding on two characters just wasn’t for me. So she’s mostly in TOC25 gear she bought on a GDKP (lucky run where all cloth dropped and nobody wanted it so I got it cheap)

We moved both our sets of 80s over to Winterhoof and into Crits and Giggles last weekend and since then I’ve raided three times – twice on my mage. Monday and Tuesday nights I took her to an ICC 10 man. The Monday night raid was awesome though we only downed 3 bosses – Reputation Grind wrote about that here. And last night we got 6 bosses down and some good tries on Putricide. It was late though and I had to quit. Morning comes too early these days…

Anyway it was neat. Arcane mage rotation is… nice and simple. I’ve macroed most of my cooldowns into one giant macro that I just pop every few minutes, otherwise it’s stack Arcane Blast to 4, wait for Arcane Missiles to proc, fire. Shoot a little on the run. Profit. My gear is weak but I was putting out a respectable amount of damage, which pleased me.

Being a healer has made me a better mage, no question. My situational awareness is way higher than it ever used to be. Get out of the fire? No problem. Stack for spores? No problem. Switch to bonespikes? Got it! I was really thrilled. It’s always nice when skills in one role translate into skills in another role.

And the fights – wow! You really see so much more of them when you’re not staring at healing frames. I’ve been running ICC for nearly a year now and there are things I’ve only just learned. Lady Deathwhisper’s adds, for instance, which ones a mage is supposed to hit. And how you can kill yourself if you shoot the wrong one (fully stacked Arcane Missiles spell reflected back = dead mage. Ow. True story). That the axe throwers on the ship get stronger if they’re not taken down. And just how pretty some of these fights are.

It’s not going to make me switch my preferred roles, but perhaps with the new tighter lockouts, Invariant will get more playtime. At the very least I feel like she’s got a new lease on life. Something beyond “pet collector” and “achievement monkey”.

So that said… where’s all the mage blogs at? Other than Frost is the New Black I just don’t know any….

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Well to be strict the PPI is a mage blog… even though it’s well hidden I guess. :)

There are a bunch of more serious mage bloggers around. If you’re into fire with a bit of PvP and a ton of humour, go visit Gnomeaggedon at http://gnomeaggedon.net/

Mana Obscura is run by a mage and he has collected a great resource list for mages. And don’t miss the forums that were started there, at Mana Obscurea, this summer. It’s a wonderful place to go if you want to talk mage stuff or need a bit of update on the class and find EJ hard to explore.

Ah! I thought I remembered a good mage blog and Mana Obscura is probably it. I read you and Gnomeaggedon for the content and not the theorycrafting – oh that sounds bad doesn’t it? But I think of you as a “blogger who is a mage” not a “mage blogger” if that makes sense. :)

Easy to heal in multi-add or boss fights = “Why yes I did see that big pack of adds being pulled I established aggro on the group and popped my health cooldown and dodge trinket to help out my beloved healer since *sigh* there is always ONE dps who wants to off tank” (hugs) healer

I hear ya angry. As someone that regularly tanks and heals I like to think I know when to pop my cooldowns and how to make myself easier to heal. The last couple runs I healed had some pretty soft people in them and holy cow were they hard to heal. Everyone should try a little of everything for the experiance.

I raided a bit on my mage last week… and I still don’t like her and plan to keep her shelved forever. Some of my healer skills have translated – I always check my range to the healers, because I know how I hate people who die because they ran too far.

On the other hand, bone spikes and anything involving turning around and/or target changes… hopeless. If I can remember there’s a kobold/spike/add, then it takes me 5 seconds to alt-tab through everything in the room, get to it, miss it, try to remember the “tab back” key combination, tab through everything again… One of the reasons I like my healers so much is that I can heal with my back turned and my slow keyboard turner ways won’t kill many people :P